(At Least) Four Things for Testers To Do in Planning Meetings

There’s much talk these days of DevOps, and Agile development, and “shift left”. Apparently, in these process models, it’s a revelation that testers can do more than test a built product, and that testers can and should be involved at every step of development.

In Rapid Software Testing, that’s not exactly news. From the beginning, we’ve rejected the idea that the product has to be complete, or has to pass some kind of “quality gate” or meet “acceptance criteria” before we start testing. We welcome the opportunity to test anything that anyone is willing to give us. We’ll happily do testing at any time from the moment someone has an idea for a product until long after the product has been released.

When testers are invited to planning meetings, there’s clearly no product to test. So what are we there for?

We’re there to learn. Testing is evaluating a product by learning about it through exploration and experimentation. At the meeting, there is a product to test. Running code is not the only kind of product we can test—not by a long shot. Ideas, designs, documents, drawings, and prototypes are products too. We can explore them, and perform thought experiments on them—and we can learn about them and evaluate them.

At the meeting, we’re there to learn about the product; to learn about the technology; to learn about the contexts in which the product will be used; to learn about plans for building the product. Our role is to become aware of all of the sources of information that might aid in our testing, and in development of the product generally. We’re there to find out about risks that threaten the value of the product in the short and long term, and about problems that might threaten the on-time, successful completion of the product.

We’re there to advocate for testability.Testability might happen by accident, without our help. It’s the role of a responsible tester to make sure that testability happens intentionally, by design. Note that testability is not just about stuff that’s intrinsic to the product. There are factors in the project, in our notions of value, and in our understanding of the risk gap that influence testability. Testability is also subjective with respect to us, our knowledge and skills, and our relationship to the team. So part of our jobs during preparation for development is to ask for the help we’ll need to make ourselves more powerful testers.

We’re there to challenge. Other people are in roles oriented towards building the product. They are focused on synthesis, and envisioning success. If they’re designers, they might be focused on helping the user to accomplish a task, on efficiency, or effectiveness, or on esthetics. If they’re business people, they might be focused on accomplishing some business goal, or meeting a deadline. Developers are often focused more on the details than on the big pictures. All of those people may be anxious to declare and meet a definition of “done”.

The testing role is to think critically about the product and the project; to ask how we might be fooling ourselves. We’re tilted towards asking good questions instead of getting “the right answer”; towards analysis more than synthesis; towards skepticism and suspicion more than optimism; towards anticipating problems more than seeking solutions. We can do those other things, but when we do, we pop for that moment out of a testing role and into a building role.

As testers, we’re trying to notice problems in what people are talking about in the meetings. We’re trying to identify obstacles that might hinder the user’s task; ways in which the product might be ineffective, inefficient, or unappealing. We’re trying to recognize how the business goal might not be met, or how the deadline could be blown. We’re alternating between small details and the big picture. We’re trying to figure out how our definition of done might be inadequate; how we might be fooling ourselves into believing we’re done when we’re not. We’re here to challenge the idea that something is okay when it might not be okay.

We’re there to establish our roles as testers.A role is a heuristic that helps in managing time, focus, and responsibility. The testing role is a commitment to perform valuable and necessary services: to focus on discovering problems, ideally early when they’re small, so that they can be prevented from turning into bigger problems later; to build a product and a project that affords rapid, inexpensive discovery and learning; and to challenge the ideas and artifacts that represent what we think we know about the product and its design. These tasks are socially, psychologically, emotionally, and politically difficult. Unless we handle them gracefully, our questioning, problem-focused role will be seen as merely disruptive, rather than an essential part of the process of building something excellent.

In Rapid Software Testing, we don’t claim that someone must be in the testing role, or must have the job title “tester”. We do believe that having someone responsible for the testing role helps to put focus on the task of providing helpful feedback. This should be a service to the project, not an obstacle. It requires us to maintain close social distance while maintaining a good deal of critical distance.

Of course, the four things that I’ve mentioned here can be done in any development model. They can be done not only in planning meetings, but at any time when we are engaging with others, at any time in the product’s development, at any level of granularity or formality. DevOps and Agile and “shift left” are context. Testing is always testing.